At first Adriane Frazier didn't know what had changed. But something was different at her West Oakland home.

"I could hear the birds chirping as I was sitting in the living room, I realized," the 30-year-old new mother said. "And I thought, 'Why don't I usually hear these sounds of nature in West Oakland? And why is my daughter suddenly taking full two-hour naps?' "

"Oh," Frazier said, "the BART!"

While this week's strike by BART workers has gummed up the commute for hundreds of thousands of regular riders, it has also brought a rare and welcome respite for those who live near the whining, clattering, clanking trains.

"Every three minutes in the afternoon, they come - ching, ching, ching - like that," said Eddy Villanueva, 60, in the front yard of his West Oakland home, as the BART tracks loomed quietly overhead. "But all week, nothing! It is good."

During any given weekday commute, 54 trains rumble across 104 miles of BART track, and they continue from 4 a.m. to well past midnight. But since workers have been on strike most trains have sat at rail yards.

In El Cerrito, 74-year-old Margaret Pennington got home from a trip to Maui this week to find that waves of heat and labor strife had descended on the Bay Area. As it turned out, one problem solved the other.

Open window a treat

"I've been sleeping with my window open - (BART) is always too loud for that," she said.

Pennington, who has lived five blocks from the tracks since they were built more than four decades ago, normally doesn't mind the BART noise. Still, she said, a break sure was nice.

"When you have a good TV program going," she explained, "you have to get up and close the patio door because you can't hear."

Liz Olhsson, a 27-year-old doctoral student at UC Berkeley, lives right next to the elevated tracks. Nosy commuters often peer right into what ought to be a cozy backyard.

"We have the great misfortune of living right next to a piece of BART track that is uneven, so you don't just get the screeching and the honking, we get a ka-dump, ka-dump, ka-dump each time a train comes through," Olhsson said.

"It's to the point," she added, "that when we're watching a movie on Netflix we'll pause it every 10 minutes."

Olhsson said she realizes her ability to watch films uninterrupted is a headache for the rest of the Bay Area.

Also unsettling

"I know that our quiet is costing a lot of people a lot of time," she said. "I heard a train at 1 a.m. Monday and I wondered if that was the last BART train I was going to hear for a while."

The sudden silence, though, can also unsettle, said Suneeta Manandhar, 31, whose apartment balcony in El Cerrito looks out at BART tracks.

"It is too peaceful," she said, adding that her husband can't get to work without BART. "My son and I walked to Walgreens and he asked what was happening to make it so quiet. I told him 'Nothing is happening, BART is on strike.' "

It was a different story near the West Oakland BART station, where BART lined up charter buses this week to take stranded commuters across the bay.

"Quiet? It ain't been quiet," said Alana Dunson, 48, who has lived near the BART tracks for 40 years. "It's been a mess with all these buses, early in the morning. The buses make more noise than the trains do!"

Frazier, the West Oakland mother, said she would savor the strike, while preparing for its inevitable end.

"I guess I'll have to get over the fact that the nap interruptions will commence again," Frazier said. "Of course when you decide to live somewhere you know to some degree that you're going to have to deal with the sounds of the city."